Abstract

This chapter describes Hume's positive account of our idea of necessity, the perceptual nature of the metaphor of ‘spreading the mind’, and revisits realism. It is argued that Hume's account is projective in two senses. The first is explanatory, whereby the modal element of causal thought is explained non-detectively. The second is feature projective, whereby we attribute a feature of mind to an external object. The chapter argues that Hume's account is better than commentators have thought.